Woman left in Harvard bushes as a baby tracks down birth mother

On the morning of June 29, 1987, the Harvard Police Department received a call.

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When the person at the precinct asked who was calling, they were met with a swift “click.”

The caller had hung up. The same scenario happened again at 7:49 a.m., 8:06 a.m. and 8:29 a.m.

“There is a baby in the bushes on the corner of Hart and Dewey streets.”

“Who is this?” Click.

Found only an hour old in the 100 block of Hart Street in Harvard, a baby girl lay in a bush, loosely wrapped in a green towel she had kicked off, hypothermic and with her umbilical cord still attached – only 600 feet from the answers to all of the questions that would haunt her for 30 years.

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Police searched door to door while the baby regained her health under the care of Dr. William Tortoriello and staff at a hospital in Harvard.

Tortoriello had commented in a Northwest Herald story that the baby “was extremely cold and blue when she came into the hospital” and that “her temperature was so low it didn’t register on the thermometer,” meaning it had dropped below 92 degrees.

Her story was on the front page of the Northwest Herald three times the week she was born.
The 7-pound, 13-ounce, foundling grew stronger and was given the name Amber Ann by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

She was given a name but no answers as the police ran into nothing but dead-end leads on who her parents were.

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Found on a Monday and released from the hospital the following Wednesday, Amber Ann entered this world a mystery.

The newborn immediately went to live with a foster family and officially was adopted by the family six months later.

Amber Ann Graupner would be her identity.

Graupner grew up in St. Charles with her older brother – who also was adopted – an engineer father and a stay-at-home mother. At 7 years old, Graupner’s adoptive mother told her of her adoption.

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“My mom sat us down while my dad was at work and told my brother and me our stories,” Graupner said. “She said that my brother’s story was a bit different than mine. She just said they adopted us both from birth, we officially became theirs after about a year, they love us, and we would always be their kids. It was kind of crazy."

Graupner said she is thankful for her adoptive parents and brother, constantly using the word “amazing” to describe them. She said she could not have asked for a better situation, but always felt that little piece of her missing.

“My parents and my brother are both tall, and they’re very big into academics. My family’s just different from me,” Graupner said. “My dad likes to garden and make airplane models, and my mom likes to quilt, and I always wanted to do the craziest sports and I was always the hyper one. I think it hit me, and I knew more after they told me. It sort of made sense.”

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Her story left many holes yet to be filled, which caused a bit of confusion in her adolescent and teenage years.

“I was not a troubled child, but I was a crazy kid,” said Graupner, now 31. “I was always looking for answers. You know how you take those state tests in school and you always have to list an ethnicity? I would put down like black, and I would make up stories about my upbringing. I just didn’t really know who I was.

"When everybody else was like, ‘Let’s do family trees’ in school, I’d be like, ‘Uh, I don’t know what I am.’ It’s hard. I had a great upbringing, my parents are incredible, and they supported me through everything I wanted to do, even though we were very different, but you always want to know who you are. So I would just make up these stories of who I thought my mom was. I would go into the supermarket and look at someone and be like, ‘Oh my gosh, what if she’s my mom?' ”

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Eventually, her need to know no longer could be kept at bay. At 17 years old, Graupner headed north.

With her best friend in tow, Graupner made her way from St. Charles to Harvard to stand at the site of her abandonment.

“I had this little piece of information, and I just needed something,” Graupner said. “I saw the corner where I was left, and there were train tracks nearby, so I thought maybe someone jumped off the train with me and left me there. We walked around town, and I went to the police station, and I was like ‘Hey. I’m the baby in the bush.’ The officer there was actually the one that found me. It was pretty emotional.”

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Graupner couldn’t recall which officer she spoke to, but she remembers him tearing up and saying, “We always wondered how you were doing. We thought about you a lot.”
“I think that was really all I needed for a while,” Graupner said.

But that didn't last. She graduated college, got married and her mother-in-law got her a 23andMe DNA kit for Christmas in 2017. She knew Graupner and her husband wanted children and thought it would help.

"I really appreciated it, and I did the test," Graupner said. "It gave me matches for second and third cousins. I reached out but no one knew anything, and I think that was the first time I really felt defeated. I was just sort of coming to grips with the fact that I would never know anything, and that [stunk], but I was like, ‘OK, this is it. Let’s move on.’ And then I got a message about two months later, and it was from a first cousin.”

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The first cousin is of full Mexican descent and, given Graupner's half-Irish descent, per the DNA test, the cousin’s first question was, “Why are you white?”

“I was like, ‘Well, why are you, you?’ ” Graupner said. “I wasn’t going to entertain the message but decided to. She said she was going to do some digging. She wanted to tell me everything about my family, and I sort of blew her off because I was like, ‘Stop, I don’t know you.’ Then I got a text from her a couple weeks later that said, ‘I think I know who your dad is, can he call you?’ "

Graupner took the call. He told her that he was from the South Side of Chicago and that his name was Robert. He had dated a girl from Harvard.

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He said he did not know about Graupner until now, and then he just said it: “He told me her name. He just said it. I knew her name,” Graupner said. “I was sort of paralyzed. I still didn’t believe him. My friends helped me do a White Pages search. I looked up her address, and where she had lived was 600 feet from where I was left. Suddenly, it was like, ‘Oh, this is her.' "

Graupner said she searched Facebook for her birth mother, the whole time in sort of a haze.

“My friend called me and was like, 'I found her. She's on Facebook, but she’s not active. I
found her sons and told them your story.’ So I messaged them and was like, ‘Hey, I hate to blow up your entire world, but this is a 30-year-old question I’ve needed to know the answer to.' I got a message back from her son, and he was like, ‘That’s your mom. She’s gonna call you when she’s off work.'

Graupner spoke to her birth mother’s sister and mother, and then got a phone call from her biological mother at 10 p.m. that night.

“She told me the whole story,” Graupner said.

At her request, Graupner’s birth mother will be referred to by her middle name, Lynn. She asked to not be identified for fear of public retribution.

Lynn moved to Harvard at 19 years old. Her mother and sister had moved to New York to be near family, but Lynn decided to move from Chicago to Harvard with her father. Lynn met Graupner's birth father while living in Chicago. The relationship did not last long after Lynn’s move to Harvard, although she believes she was pregnant during the move.
Lynn said she blocked out a lot of the details, but in speaking with Graupner, found that a lot of them started coming back.

“I had missed my period, of course, but I thought it was due to stress,” Lynn said. “I was sort of in denial. Of course you know you’re pregnant, but I hid it very well, and I didn’t know where to go from there.

"I didn’t have my mom or my sister around, and my dad would have killed me if he found out. I knew I had to hide it. I would eat a lot of salads, and I worked at a bank at the time, so I would wear a large suit jacket almost every day that would help hide it.”

Then came the morning that Lynn had been dreading since discovering she was pregnant. About 6 a.m., she started to experience severe cramping.

“It was early in the morning, and I started to get horrible stomach cramps,” Lynn said. “At one point, my dad had come up to check on me because he had heard me get up. I ended up feeling the baby start to come out, so I went in the bathroom. My dad came up and saw blood in the hallway and asked if I was OK. I told him I had got my period really bad, and he left me alone with that. He wasn’t good with girls stuff.”

Lynn proceeded to place herself in the tub and deliver the baby on her own, doing her best to be as quiet as possible so as not to alert those in the house. Amber was born there.

“I just tried to be really quiet,” Lynn said. “After I had her, I tried to pull out the umbilical cord and I remember it hurting really bad. I knew from TV to cut the umbilical cord with scissors, so I did. I was going to hop in my car but didn’t know where I was going to go.”

When Lynn left the house, she found the car of her father’s girlfriend was blocking her in the driveway. Taking the baby in her vehicle was not an option, so she panicked and headed into the backyard, trying to think of her next move.

“I had Amber wrapped up in a towel. She had grabbed my finger, and it was so funny the strength she had when she grabbed my finger,” Lynn said, fighting through tears. “She was so strong. I ended up outside with her and didn’t know where to go, so I ran through our backyard, and there was this bush, so I put her in there."

Lynn recalled being worried and wanting someone to pick up her baby. She called the police station and hospital several times.

Lynn returned home, showered and readied herself for work. When she left the house, she drove past the bush to ensure the baby was no longer there and headed to her job.

Safe-haven laws were enacted in Illinois in 2011, allowing for an unharmed newborn up to 30 days old to be handed to staff at a hospital, emergency medical care facility, police station, fire station, college or university police station or Illinois State Police district headquarters, according to the Save Abandoned Babies Foundation website.

No questions need to be answered by the parent surrendering the baby, according to the law, but the parent can accept an information packet that summarizes the law and their rights.

Lynn did not receive any type of medical treatment during or after her pregnancy.

“Of course it was horribly painful, and I’m so lucky I didn’t need a cesarean [section] or something,” Lynn said. “An angel was definitely watching over us that day. A lot of bad things could have happened, and they didn’t.”

The story was in the Northwest Herald, and some of the women at Lynn’s job had their suspicions. Her boss asked Lynn directly if the story in the paper was about her, but Lynn denied it. Lynn knew other women at her work also were talking about it.

Lynn had seen the articles and learned that the baby had been named Amber. Lynn never told anyone what happened that morning. She eventually married and had children. When the internet arrived, she randomly would go online and search for updates on baby Amber, but she never was able to find any new information. Lynn only wanted to know that her daughter was OK.

Thirty years would pass before she would have an answer, at the other end of a phone call.

“I was so happy to hear her voice,” Lynn said. “Throughout my life, I would drive past my old house or I would see moms with their little girls and think about it. I just didn’t know what happened to her, and I always just hoped she was OK. It was really something else.”
Lynn said her first thought was that Graupner was doing well for herself. She was well-spoken and well-educated.

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Graupner graduated from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and was a pro-athlete for about three years in the National Pro Grid League, a functional fitness league that mixes gymnastics and weight-lifting.

She also was on Season 5, Episode 8, of CMT’s “Steve Austin’s Broken Skull Challenge.”

She now lives in Sacramento, California, with her husband and works as a personal trainer, helping to run a successful gym in East Sacramento.

“Even the life I had dreamed for Amber wasn’t as good as the one she has now,” Lynn said.
The two started to talk on a regular basis, getting to know one another.

“I think she knows I love her,” Lynn said. “Now I’m doing goofy things like constantly sending her presents, which I know is stupid and I need to stop it, but I can’t help it. I’m just so happy. I just wanted her to be OK.”

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The two have said they hope to meet one day but are taking things slow. The news has
been a lot to take in for both of their families, so they are taking things in stride.

Since their interviews in early October, they have decided to cut ties for the time being.

Graupner said she’s able to look forward with the weight of not knowing now lifted, but she feels it’s better to keep that part of her life separate. She can’t wait to move forward and have her own children.

“I’m glad I got to know her,” Graupner said. “Everything happens for a reason, and I’m happy we got to know each other. It’s good to figure out this piece of my life. I’m just going to keep moving and see where it all takes me.”